Daniel_Stuckey writes: This weekend, the popular password cracker software Hashcat rolled out an update that makes it possible to break passwords up to 55 characters long—a big leap from the previous 15-character limit. To retrieve the original word, password recovery systems run millions of guesses through the same cryptographic function that first generated the hash value, and wait for a match. As you can imagine, the longer and more complicated the sequence, the more time this takes. But the process is advancing rapidly—now, the new version of Hashcat can conduct 8 billion guesses per second, with an unlimited number of tries.